Abstract
Abstract This paper aims to design and propose a new measurement model for social services transparency in municipalities. The model includes an empirical study of 38 municipalities in Spain. The information published on these municipalities’ websites is evaluated through experimental quantitative methods using multivariate analysis. The municipalities chosen were those with the highest population that also disclosed the largest amount of information and provided the easiest access to their websites. The paper's conceptual framework was constructed by combining the Spanish legal context with a bibliographic review based on the latest transparency models. The research proposes a new Transparency Evaluation Model for Social Services to measure transparency in municipalities using the social services information published on the websites. Factors considered include degree of ease and amount of time spent by citizens in accessing the website. Some conclusions indicate that transparency remains difficult to achieve, information is less accessible to citizens than it should be, and transparency differs among the municipalities due to the legal changes implemented in recent years, as well as to other economic and social variables.
Highlights
Municipalities in Spain hold the political status of basic and public organizations
With the exception of the area Cost (0.310, 0.759), the results show that the variable Model of Transparency of Social Services (MTSS) depends on all the areas: % total presence by activity_area (0.038, 0.000), % total presence by budget_area (0.03, 0.069), % total presence by coverage_area (0.068, 0.000), % total presence by environment_area (0.022, 0.000), and % total presence by transparency law_area (0.03, 0.000)
No consensus exists on the concept of transparency, perhaps due to the merely incipient legal initiative to promote all the issues related to transparency
Summary
Municipalities in Spain hold the political status of basic and public organizations. Given the importance of this type of organization to citizens, achieving a system of transparency requires involving citizens in the management of public services provided by municipal institutions. Embezzlement, fraud, and abuse of power in governments have prompted growing demand from society to access public information. Access requires an intensive system of Right-to-Information laws through the encouragement, assistance, or insistence of the international community. Such legislation is especially needed in the European Union (EU) countries’ accession process (Trapnell and Lemieux, 2014) because public authorities deny transparency by withholding the required pertinent information more often than they should (Nigam, 2015)
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